Matthew Marks is pleased to announce the opening of his new gallery in Los Angeles. The first exhibition in the gallery, Ellsworth Kelly: Los Angeles, opens to the public on January 20, 2012.

Located in West Hollywood, the gallery is a newly constructed freestanding building with 3,500 sq.ft. of naturally lit exhibition galleries. Designed by the young Los Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner, the building’s façade features a monumental sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly.

Kelly’s new Los Angeles sculpture, which measures 8 x 40 feet, is installed almost 30 feet off the ground and ten inches out from the façade of the building. It is among his largest works in any medium and is the first to incorporate a building’s architecture into his own work. In one succinct gesture, the entire façade of the building is part of the sculpture. Kelly’s sculpture relates to two important early works: Study for Black and White Panels, 1954, a collage created during the artist’s time in Paris, and Black Over White, a 1966 painting made in New York City, both of which will be on view in the gallery as part of the opening exhibition.

Ellsworth Kelly has said of his new Los Angeles sculpture, “This isn’t an ornament. It’s part of the architecture. Renzo Piano told me, ‘You know, architects now are doing buildings like your paintings.’” The floating effect of the facade’s relief is reminiscent of Kelly’s recent relief paintings, many of which feature a shaped canvas placed on top of a rectangular or triangular canvas.

Ellsworth Kelly made his first sculptures in wood in Paris in the early 1950’s. His first large-scale sculpture, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957, shown at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, in 1998, is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Permanent installations of his sculptures can now be seen in cities around the world from Tokyo to Barcelona. Recently, large-scale sculptures have been commissioned by the Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Matthew Marks opened his first gallery on Madison Avenue in 1991. In 1994, he opened among the first commercial gallery spaces in Chelsea, at the gallery’s current location: 522 West 22nd Street. In 1996, a second Chelsea space was opened at 523 West 24th Street, and by 2011 his four New York galleries totaled over 20,000 square feet. 1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, will be the fifth location of the Matthew Marks Gallery.